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This Week in Digital Strategy 2.7.14

Happy Friday, everyone! Hopefully you had a better week than Bob Costas, whose eye has seen better days. This week was another insightful week in the world of digital strategy. We have rounded up the best articles from around the web. We have a great discussion about mobile this week our Program Director, James Maconochie has posed the question, “Should everything go mobile?” Continuing the discussion we have a great article on why mobile apps are the future of marketing. We also give you tips on how to correctly run a social media contest to increase your brand’s value and how to develop KPIs to determine your content marketing’s ROI. Finally, we see how Marc Jacobs in using ‘social currency’ in their Manhattan pop-up shop to increase their brand value on social media.

Our Program Director, James Maconochie raises a hot-button topic about mobile. With mobile becoming more integrated into the marketing mix it is an important question to think about when coming up with your digital strategy. James provides some great insight to this topic.

This trend seems unlikely to change any time soon. In the process of considering the solution and researching alternatives, I began to wonder at what point in the future would the responsive path become the de facto standard, and website owners would move away from custom mobile experiences. This thinking is echoed in any number of blogs, articles and studies that many of us have seen. We considered a couple of different approaches for customer portal, but ultimately decided that a responsive approach, i.e., one that causes the layout to adjust based upon the resolution (width) of the display of the device being used to access it, was the way to go.

A social media contest is an excellent way to increase your company’s reach on the web. That being said a botched social media contest can bring your company negative press and make you lose credibility. Marketing Pros put together a great list of do’s and don’ts that you need to take into account when putting together a social media contest.

Consider what type of contest best suits your interests and your audience. Sweepstakes are easy to enter, but media (photos, video, essay, etc.) contests give you more content for your site and page. There are benefits to each type of contest; the ideal choice depends on what would be most suitable and appealing to your audience. Also take into consideration the way that the winners are chosen. Should the voting be entirely left up to the public, via likes, retweets, etc.? Should just one person be appointed judge? Should there be a council of judges?

Furthering the discussing on mobile this week we have another insightful article from Business 2 Community. The article mentions statistics from a new Gartner study that states by 2017, mobile apps will be downloaded more than 268 billion times, generating revenue of more than $77 billion.

Even now, research shows that apps are beginning to dominate the mobile ecosystem. In 2013, the U.S. consumer spent an average of 2 hours and 38 minutes per day on smartphones and tablets. 80% of that time (2 hours and 7 minutes) was spent inside apps and 20% (31 minutes) was spent on the mobile web. Digital marketers focused on producing ever greater amounts of web-based content in an attempt capture consumer mindshare may want to consider this and shift some resources into specific-use mobile app production.

Having a constant stream of fresh content is essential to building your company’s value on and offline. That is only one piece of the puzzle though. Identifying KPIs to measure the ROI from your content marketing is the other piece to the puzzle. Smart Insights has developed 5 Questions to help set, manage and review your content marketing effectiveness.

Commercial measures: These are the harder business or commercial measures and what usually takes the longest to be demonstrable. These are the measures for the senior managers although they may well also need to know about Likes! Think audience share, sales, leads or at least clear indicators from people such satisfaction ratings or % that fed back. Remember that these need to be incremental and ideally attributable to your content marketing. Dave will show you how to attribute these using Google Analytics in a separate post.

Marc Jacobs Pop-Up Shop Takes Tweets, Instagram Photos for Payment

Did you ever think Tweets and Instagram photos would get you designer products? Well, Marc Jacobs has done just that. Marc Jacobs has opened a pop-up shop in New York City where the only currency that is used is ‘social currency.’ You can walk out with products in exchange for sending tweets, Instagram photos and Facebook posts. By snapping photos and posting messages with the hashtag #MJDaisyChain, visitors are awarded with Marc Jacobs-branded gifts when exiting the store. This ranges from perfume and necklaces to even purses (the best Instagram photo of the day will win a handbag). Each visitor then visits the front counter to receive a gift.

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